In your wilting Thursday media column: the Stelter-Lapin dream couple is no more, WaPo employees get a raise, Vogue's September issue is big, the NYT Co. has glimmers of hope, and the LAT will remake itself, with blogs.

NYT media boy Brian Stelter made a big splash when he "made the scene" last month with glamorous new girlfriendNicole Lapin, a CNBC anchor. Media power couple blah blah blah! Alas, these star-crossed lovers were not meant to be; they've broken up, we hear. Goodbye, America's innocence. We would make a joke here about how media guys are not allowed to date attractive women anyhow, but real life continues to show us that this is not the case, for reasons that we still cannot even begin to figure out.

Sweet new deal for Washington Post employees: a $13 per week raise, and a $1,200 lump sum, thanks to the new union deal! WaPo employees will still be required to buy their own uniforms and clock out when they take their 15-minute breaks, but management is going to give them 20% off the cost of Big Macs, as long as they don't loiter in the parking lot after their shifts.

Mandatory Vogue September issue report! This year the Vogue September issue will have 584 ad pages. That's 25% more than last year! But still well behind the record set in 2007. Now you know all about Vogue's September issue ad pages.

The New York Times Co.lost $120 million in the second quarter, although that was mostly due to a writedown of the declining value of their smaller newspaper properties; their profit otherwise was about $83 million, compared to $93 million in the same quarter last year. And the digital subscription model seems to be doing... good enough! Qualified optimism, would be a fair pose to adopt towards these numbers.

The bad news at the LA Times is that rumors are floating around that it could get sold. The good news: more people are reading its blogs, a fact that the online editor attributes partly to "improved playing to the search engines by the Times' bloggers." Will Google-baiting link-whoring save the LAT? Sure, why not?